DADI.org

New York Daily News

From: News and Views | Opinion |
Saturday, September 12, 1998
Parents Do Matter

by John Leo

Judith Rich Harris' book "The Nurture Assumption" is apparently a commercial and talk-show success. That leaves publishers, critics and psychologists scratching their heads and struggling to figure out why.

Harris argues that nothing much that mothers and fathers do will have any long-term effect on their children. Genes and peer group pressures are the real formative factors.

Readers may find it hard to believe that Harris has managed to hold on to her theory while raising two children of her own, or rather, standing by while genes and peers raised them. As she's quick to say in her book, Harris is not a psychologist or a social scientist. She's what journalists call a rewrite man, someone who takes the work of others and puts it into plain English for popular consumption.

Until recently, she did this as a textbook writer. Now she has rewritten the literature on a continuing debate in the social sciences — how much of personality and character is due to nurture (parents and environmental factors) versus nature (genetics and evolution).

This debate has gone on for decades. Researchers point to a genetic base for traits such as shyness, nurturance and aggression, and even for behaviors such as suicide and divorce. Harris' contribution, if you want to call it that, has been to take this debate and inject it into the national conversation in the most extreme and simpleminded form possible.

Along the way, she makes many of the conventional mistakes of the rewrite man, who's often distant from the actual work being rewritten. She accepts fuzzy concepts such as "intelligence" and "personality" as if their meaning were absolutely clear, takes what people say on questionnaires at face value and ignores findings that don't fit her thesis. One of these is the consistent finding that when parents make a strong effort to talk and read to their young children, the children turn out to be more verbal and get better grades than other children.

"That fact alone is enough to discredit her thesis," said Harvard's Jerome Kagan, a leading expert in child development.

So how did a shaky, naive and extreme book by an unknown with no credentials in the field come to be such a success? The poor performance of the elite media obviously played a role — The New Yorker and Newsweek both put the story on their covers. So did the fact that the book came along in August, a dull news month when otherwise rational editors scramble after marginal stories.

Some editors waved off objections by pointing out that the American Psychological Association gave Harris an award for an article that became the basis for her book. But the APA gives out prizes like soup lines give out soup. The organization has 50 divisions, each of which gives two, three or four awards a year, for a probable total of 200 or more annually. And this doesn't count the more prestigious association-wide awards given above the division level.

Then, too, the book was perfectly geared to our talk-show culture, which loves passionate controversy over "high-concept" topics that can be explained in 10 words or less. Samples: "The Holocaust never happened," "Scientists are lying to us — the Earth is flat" and "Parents don't count — genes and peers do."

There's another obvious factor. Many anxious parents want reassurance that their child-rearing hasn't hurt their children. And self-absorbed parents with a track record of putting their desires ahead of their children's needs want absolution, now available in book form for only $26.

Publishers have been feeding the market for parental absolution for some time. Books and articles explained to us that divorce doesn't matter to children (it's better to separate than to argue in front of the kids) and that the amount of time spent with the children doesn't matter ("quality time" will make up for the loss of old-fashioned quantity time). Now comes the ultimate gift in marketing of parental absolution: Nothing you do or don't do matters at all.

The ultimate message here is that sacrifice, concern and loving treatment of one's children no longer makes sense. Why bother, if genes and peer groups are doing the real parenting?

Our society is hip-deep in evidence of the pain and loss of underparented and unparented children. It's no time to celebrate a foolish book that justifies self-absorption and makes nonparenting a respectable, mainstream activity.

Back to DA*DI's Home